Empress of the East

by Leslie Peirce

  It is difficult to evaluate an incident relayed as much as three decades after it happened, although the story of the fight probably circulated in Istanbul earlier. Why it was not reported earlier is a puzzle, for Roxelana’s extraordinary influence was evident by the mid-1530s at the latest. Bragadin had not hesitated in 1526 to air the news of her hysterics over Suleyman’s acquisition of two gift slave women, so it was not a sense of propriety that kept the Venetians from telling intimate tales of the harem. But the alleged brawl had acquired relevance at the time Navagero related news of it. In the years the ambassador was resident in Istanbul, political gossip revolved around the looming contest to succeed the aging sultan (by the Islamic calendar, Suleyman was sixty in 1553, old by sixteenth-century standards). Enormously popular, Mustafa was a particular focus of the conversation, and the fate of Roxelana’s sons formed an obvious corollary of his apparent advantage. Interest in the two mothers was doubtless heightened.

  Navagero’s report shows us Roxelana once again demonstrating the kind of clever histrionics that had caused Suleyman and Hafsa to dispose of the two Russian slaves. In exposing Mahidevran’s assault, Roxelana appeared to be playing both the eunuch and the sultan. It should be no surprise that the training of royal mothers prepared them to be astutely manipulative. Mahidevran’s own arsenal contained verbal rapiers. The insult “sold meat” implied that Roxelana had been bought directly off the slave market, while Mahidevran had presumably arrived in the Ottoman palace by some more refined route.

  But can we trust Navagero’s story? It matters because Venice’s ambassadorial reports were read and valued in European capitals. They functioned as an index of intelligence as well as local public opinion that contributed, for better or worse, to Roxelana’s reputation. Tension between the two royal consorts was not unexpected, although the story of the brawl had perhaps been embroidered over time. Whether Mahidevran had an irascible personality or was prone to violence is hard to say; all other references to her in Venetian reports are exemplary. But the tale is not preposterous, and her self-defense to the sultan—the assault on her rank as senior concubine—is wholly plausible.

  Mahidevran had nothing left to lose but her rank once Suleyman focused his favors so lavishly on Roxelana. The sultan was upsetting the careful balance among consorts that the politics of reproduction demanded, and Mahidevran apparently took it on herself to right it. She was a product of the old world of separate but equal family constellations, a system that imbued the role of mother to a prince with considerable honor and dignity. The monopoly by a favorite with multiple sons inevitably stole a portion of that stature. The mothers of the dead princes Mahmud and Murad were there to share the indignity, but Mahidevran was the only mother of a prince left standing to resist further erosion of her small family’s fortunes. If her audacious assertion of rank cost her the sultan’s favor, it may have won her sympathy and support, and even admiration, in other quarters.

  Mahidevran and Roxelana were together in the Old Palace for thirteen years. It is possible they got along during much of that time or at least maintained a cordial distance. They were probably rarely alone together, given the large number of women who lived alongside them. Hafsa, widowed princesses, high-ranking staff, retired concubine mothers including those of Selim’s several daughters—all were women of account in the harem who presumably had a stake in preventing ruptures. The strict decorum of the Old Palace was designed to head off incidents such as Navagero described. In a polity where the royal household was the government, disorder in the harem could provoke disorder in the state.

  7

  COMING OF AGE

  LITTLE IS KNOWN of Roxelana’s life between Pietro Bragadin’s report of 1526, which introduced her to the European diplomatic world, and the 1534 report of a subsequent Venetian envoy. Daniello de’Ludovici delivered the arresting news that Suleyman and Roxelana were now wedded. Earlier dispatches from Istanbul had continued to remark that the Russian was still the sultan’s favorite, but this was a startling new development. The marriage would prove only the first step in Roxelana’s entrance onto the stage of wealth and power. Within a few years, the public measure of her radical new status would appear in the form of an elegant charitable foundation she sponsored in Istanbul, the first by an Ottoman woman in the imperial capital.

  “Neither [this sultan] nor any of his ancestors has ever taken a wife,” commented Giovanni Antonio Menavino, a Genoese familiar with Istanbul. While this statement was not wholly accurate (Ottoman rulers made marital alliances until the mid-fifteenth century), it was true that no sultan had been married to the mother of his successor, with the apparent exception of Osman, the founder of the dynastic line.1 As Menavino informed his European audience, a sultan contented himself with concubines and avoided taking a wife because, if he did so, “it would then be necessary that she be treated as Queen, just as he is the King.”2 Roxelana would soon prove the accuracy of this statement, upending generations of Ottoman precedent. Could Suleyman’s subjects learn to accept an Ottoman queen? The sultan was certainly filling the political ideal of valiant warrior and just ruler, but at the same time, he was appearing increasingly iconoclastic when it came to family politics.

  The lack of news on the diplomatic circuit between 1526 and 1534 does not mean that Roxelana’s role as royal consort was uneventful. As she groomed her maturing children—her sons to take up active service to the empire and Mihrumah, the only princess of her generation, to uphold the traditions of the two-hundred-year-old state—Roxelana too grew in knowledge and stature. Professionalizing the next royal generation was no mere domestic task but rather a core preoccupation of the whole dynastic regime. Luckily Suleyman was a consistent presence in the children’s and their mother’s lives in this period. Only one military campaign took him away between his triumphal return from Hungary in November 1526 and May 1532, when he set out again for central Europe.

  These years must also have advanced Roxelana’s political acumen. No correspondence with Suleyman survives from this time, but Roxelana was certainly acquainted with the circumstances of his daring 1529 campaign into central Europe, which ended in an aborted siege of Vienna, capital of the Hapsburg Ferdinand’s domains. The interim between Vienna and the so-called German confrontation of 1532 was far from calm as the rivalry between the two greatest powers in Europe—the Hapsburgs and the Ottomans—was heating up. How actively Suleyman tutored Roxelana in the intricacies of war and diplomacy is not clear, but it was her mandate as a potential queen mother to stay abreast of current affairs. This need to master the geopolitics of empire must have spurred Roxelana’s language facility, and one wonders when Suleyman might have begun to seek her views—perhaps less about strategy than about the individuals he relied on most closely.

  Suleyman was occasionally away from Roxelana in these interim years, spending some of his winters in the palace at Adrianople. No more than a few days’ march northwest from Istanbul, this second capital of the empire was the staging ground for land operations in Europe. From there, the sultan could be ready if need be to take off rapidly with his soldiers. How often Roxelana and the children or Mustafa and Mahidevran joined Suleyman in Adrianople is not known, but he likely wished his older sons and their mothers to become familiar with the palace and the troops stationed there. He himself had been assigned to Adrianople for more than a year, acting as his father’s deputy to face down any potential threat from Europe while Selim was battling the Iranians in the east.

  If Roxelana was not much discussed on the international news circuit in the years preceding her marriage, neither was Mahidevran. Only in 1533, when Mustafa came of age and graduated to his first post as prince-governor, did her small family emerge onto the political field. Mahidevran was presumably occupied in these quieter times with Mustafa’s preparation for his career. Although Suleyman had apparently spurned her in anger, we should not assume that he and his senior consort did not collaborate on important issues. Mustafa’s inauguration as governo
r was certainly a significant matter. As for the two mothers, whether they managed a cordial relationship we don’t know, but they would be united in 1530 in a ritual occasion that was the public debut of Mustafa, Mehmed, and Selim, Suleyman’s three oldest sons.

  SPECTACLE HAD BEEN a feature of life in Constantinople for more than a millennium, and Suleyman was a connoisseur of its political uses. Istanbulites were avid consumers of royal panoply, as were soldiers of the standing army housed in a large center-city barracks complex. Foreign ambassadors were honored guests at public occasions, for they would spread the word of Ottoman wealth and splendor. In 1530, Suleyman made the circumcision of his three eldest sons a pretext to orchestrate the most lavish celebration that the Ottoman world had seen. Fifty years had passed since the festival marking the circumcision of seven grandsons of Mehmed the Conqueror was held in the Old Palace.3

  Historians have commented that the 1530 festivities were a mask for Suleyman’s first military failure at Vienna in 1529. This is no doubt true, in part at least, but sooner or later Suleyman would have staged the magnificence for which he would become so famous. He had already begun in 1524 with the spectacular festivities organized to celebrate the marriage of his grand vizier and friend Ibrahim.4

  Had it not been for the times, the sums of money expended on behalf of Mustafa, Mehmed, and Selim would seem prodigal. The sixteenth century was an age of royal exhibitionism, and Suleyman’s contemporaries had gotten a head start. In 1520, the year of his accession, the French and English kings—Francis I, like Suleyman aged twenty-four, and Henry VIII, three years older—met with their respective courts near Calais on the so-called Field of the Cloth of Gold. The eighteen-day extravaganza included a two-day tournament featuring both kings. The purpose of the event was to cement treaties between France and England and to project both courts’ splendor to the rest of Europe. The principal target of the Anglo-French alliance, Charles V, Europe’s most powerful monarch, would soon become Suleyman’s principal rival as well. In a majestic ceremony in Bologna that took place four months before the Ottoman princes’ circumcision, the pope placed the crown of the Holy Roman Empire on the thirty-year-old Charles’s head. Perhaps the circumcision festival represented Suleyman’s response to the ostentation of the Bologna coronation. If so, it would not be his last competitive act.

  Other monarchs celebrated their coronations and their children’s marriages. Ottoman accessions were comparatively subdued occasions, however, with little panoply and no crown. New sultans were acknowledged in the private interior of the palace, their enthronement sealed by the sober oath of allegiance of leading dignitaries. And by the mid-fifteenth century, Ottoman sultans were no longer marrying foreign princesses, thereby depriving thousands of the opportunity to view the elaborate entourages that in the past guided brides from their fathers’ lands to the Ottoman capital. What the sultans did celebrate publicly were their sons’ circumcisions and their daughters’ marriages, both of which signified entrance into adulthood.

  The timing of the 1530 occasion was probably determined in part by the fact that Mustafa was by then fifteen, the age at which his father had taken up his first post, at Caffa. Suleyman may have wanted his eldest son to be ready should his presence in the provinces became strategically necessary. As for Mehmed and Selim, it was common to group brothers together for the circumcision ritual. But there were perhaps additional reasons for the triple celebration. Suleyman may have seen political value in presenting his three sons as a set, a small phalanx representing the imperial future.5 And perhaps it seemed only fair to award the nine-year-old Mehmed some public recognition. Even more likely was pressure from Roxelana to ensure that at least one of her sons shared the limelight with Mustafa (Selim, aged six, was just old enough to conduct himself with appropriate gravity). In any case, both Mahidevran and Roxelana could take deserved pride in their princes. Both were presumably absorbed in preparing them for the ceremonies.

  Parades, private banquets for political and religious leaders, and lavish entertainments for the public filled the three-week celebration. The opening day, June 27, made clear that a principal goal of the festivities was to display the empire’s military power, riches, and human capital.6 Escorted by two pashas, the second vizier Ayas and the third vizier Kasim, Suleyman paraded from the New Palace on horseback to the old Byzantine Hippodrome, the central venue for the occasion. A cordon of leading officials then escorted the sultan to the splendid throne that awaited him. Standing on columns of lapis lazuli, it was crowned by a canopy of gold with rich fabrics flying from its pinnacle.

  Symbols of Ottoman victory surrounded this dazzling structure—the tents of the revered Akkoyunlu sultan Hasan (defeated by Mehmed II) and the Mamluk sultan al-Ghawri (defeated by Selim), as well as the three bronze statues of Apollo, Diana, and Hercules taken by Ibrahim Pasha from the palace of the Hungarian king Louis II (defeated by Suleyman). Arriving at this replica of a military encampment, the sultan dismounted his horse and then, to fanfare played by the famed Ottoman military band, he mounted his throne. From this moment on, however, Suleyman did not engage in events but rather presided over them. His was a magisterial presence, his function to marshal, exhibit, and reward the agents of his power.

  In this, Suleyman differed from his European counterparts, for whom festival occasions were an opportunity to show off martial skill and daring. Suleyman’s own martial talents needed no demonstration, it was presumed, for he repeatedly reaffirmed them in battle, to Europe’s chagrin. But for a monarch like Henry VIII, who took his soldiers to war less frequently, tournaments provided a stage to display his excellence as a jouster and his mastery of chivalric virtues.7 Another reason for Suleyman’s physical reticence at his sons’ circumcision was the studied modesty before God of Muslim monarchs. They allowed no statues of themselves or portraits on coins, no ostentatious coronations, no displays of personal bravery for the entertainment of a crowd. Pomp and valor were appropriate in the service of God—pomp in the procession to Friday prayers, valor on the battlefield. The princes’ circumcision, a religious obligation, could rationalize the panoply of the 1530 event, although Suleyman’s “magnificence” in the first decades of his reign would eventually find its critics. In the later decades of his rule, the sultan himself would famously shun the flaunting of his majesty that was earlier so visible.

  Arrival of the princes at the Hippodrome, circumcision festival of 1530. Two princes, Mustafa and Mehmed, appear at the right (Selim was perhaps too young to participate in this occasion); the grand vizier Ibrahim Pasha, on horseback, awaits them on the left. Seyyid Lokman, Hünernâme.

  Despite being the object of the whole celebration, the princes appeared for the first time only on the fourteenth day of the three-week event. An escort of court officials and army officers ushered them from the Old Palace to the Hippodrome. Venetian envoy Pietro Zen thought they looked like angels.8 The princes’ steeds were probably as lavishly outfitted as they were themselves. The horses’ trappings, like the robes and turbans worn by Ottoman royalty and the thrones and tents they occupied, created a living tapestry of imperial splendor. To the crowds along the way, for whom a parade of princes was a very rare occasion, it must have been a thrilling sight. Once arrived at the Hippodrome, the brothers were received by the assembled viziers, who approached them on foot, a sign of deference, and led them to their father’s tent. It was a replica of the recently refurbished hall of the Divan, where the sultan made the great decisions of state with his Imperial Council. Privileged guests of Suleyman had a rare opportunity to view a simulacrum of the impenetrable inner reaches of the New Palace.

  But where were the mothers and the better-known queen mother? Hafsa, Mahidevran, and Roxelana were almost certainly in attendance on the day of the princes’ presentation and perhaps on other days as well. The three women were invisibly visible, so to speak—they most likely viewed the events from ringside seats within a screened balcony attached to the palace of the grand vizier. Their presence t
here would be no secret. Fronting the Hippodrome, the elegant structure had been a gift from Suleyman to Ibrahim (today it is the Turkish and Islamic Arts Museum). All three women, as well as the princes’ governesses, were surely present in Ibrahim’s palace on the eighteenth day, when the circumcision ritual finally took place. They would not participate in the actual ceremony, but they could be ready to attend to the princes later.

  If the festival was the princes’ public debut, it was also a coming out for their mothers, tangible proof of their success in raising and grooming their sons. For Mahidevran especially, it was a long-awaited moment. The parade of princes doubtless prompted the crowd to debate who was the mother of each and to compare rumors of their accomplishments. While the great majority of spectators were male, Ottoman miniature paintings of the period occasionally show ordinary women at the edges of crowds that lined the parade routes and gathered for the entertainments. Old Palace watchers would be on the lookout for the procession of the royal women’s carriages to and from the grand vizier’s palace.

  THE RUN-UP TO the main event had been a carefully orchestrated sequence of feasting and entertainment. It was all meant to build up anticipation for the princes’ arrival and, more pointedly, to demonstrate Suleyman’s munificence, a universal desideratum of monarchs. The first days were occupied with reception of the guests, each of whom kissed the sultan’s hand in fealty, and then with formal reception banquets for prominent government figures, past and present, and foreign emissaries, among whom the Venetians dominated. Lavish gifts to the sultan piled up at the foot of his throne (grand vizier Ibrahim’s presents alone were allegedly worth 50,000 gold ducats). On the fifth day, the games and amusements began, punctuated by fireworks displays at night. Entertainers included clowns, jugglers, magicians, acrobats, and Chinese shadow-theater masters.